In a Day's Work Page 7

  He approached the witness stand cautiously, like a hunter approaching wild game. He seemed unwilling to look directly at any of the lawyers or the jury. Instead, he sat sideways in the witness stand as if he were having a conversation with the wall.

  From the start, his answers were circular and vague. Even when it came to provable facts, Marín refused to respond to questions directly. When he was shown his letter of termination and asked why he no longer works at Evans Fruit, he said, “Honestly I just don’t understand what the reason was.”

  To get at how sexual harassment was handled at Evans Fruit, the government lawyers asked Marín what was expected of him, as orchard foreman, if someone reported an incident of sexual harassment. He replied that he didn’t think there was much he could do. He could call the police or move the worker to a different crew. He said there wasn’t anything more he could do beyond that because he would never be able to prove anything. Investigating the complaints was “not my responsibility,” he said.

  When asked about a crew leader under his watch who had supposedly exposed himself to other workers in the orchard, he said, “I was in charge of the orchard but it wasn’t my job to straighten up adults,” he said. “They’re not children.”

  Marín then went on to deny more than two dozen specific incidents of sexual harassment that had been lodged against him at the trial. In addition to disavowing the accusations, he said that he didn’t know nearly a half-dozen women who had made claims against him.

  When it was the company lawyers’ turn to ask Marín questions, they focused on the many tasks Marín tackled in a day to show that there was no way he had time to harass women for several hours at a time, as the workers had alleged.

  Later, back at his home in Sunnyside, Marín said that he had felt calm on the witness stand because he had nothing to hide. He said he thought the jury viewed him favorably and saw him as a “normal person.” Then, echoing the lawyers for Evans Fruit, he added, that the women bringing the case and making accusations against him “make up stories to get money.”

  The jury began their deliberations on a Tuesday after eleven days of testimony. By the next afternoon, they had filed back into the courtroom with a verdict. A handful of anxious workers took up half of the rear rows of the courtroom wearing white paper butterflies on their lapels as a symbol of hope and justice. The seats in the front row, where Bill and Jeannette Evans had watched the entire trial, were conspicuously empty. The verdict would be read without them.

  The jury foreman handed the verdict form to the law clerk, who handed it to the judge, who reviewed the page without expression. The judge handed the form back to the clerk and she read the document aloud. The clerk named each of the fourteen women who had testified in the case and stated that for each one, the jury had found that she had not been sexually harassed while working at Evans Fruit. It was a complete victory for the company.

  The women and the government lawyers sat in a kind of stunned silence. The Evans Fruit attorneys were decorously stoic. The Evanses arrived at the courthouse after court was adjourned. They had rushed in from their office and learned the good news from a court security guard on their way in. They quickly huddled with their attorneys in the courtroom.

  Out in the parking lot, the jury members got into their cars to drive home to Ellensburg or Kennewick. Before he drove off in an SUV, Bill Huntington, a juror from Walla Walla, said he didn’t feel the women had proved their case. “We all felt pretty much that there was some level of harassment but they did not establish it beyond a reasonable doubt,” said Huntington, who unwittingly cited the wrong legal standard for civil cases. “But the claimants could be more proactive or flat-off quit and say they’re going to the owners. And these things came up two to three years later. It’s not so much that we believed Juan Marín. But their stories lacked consistency. And they had problems in other areas. It’s easy to believe they had gotten together and compared notes. But I felt the Evans[es] could have done better.

  “I hope the Evans[es] will realize that they need to be more vigilant in their sexual harassment policies,” Huntington said. “It seemed they were in denial. They trusted Juan Marín and they didn’t think it could happen. They were a little too reliant on him.”

  By now, the Evanses had emerged from the courthouse. Standing next to his white Cadillac Escalade, Bill Evans said he felt “very happy.” He said, “It is a great win. It all comes down to accountability and credibility.”13

  As for Juan Marín, “I am very disappointed in him,” he said.

  Before getting into the car, Bill Evans joined a conversation between his wife and the jury foreperson, Cameron Fisher, who used to work for the Washington State Department of Labor and Industries.

  Fisher suggested that Evans Fruit should modernize its operations by hiring a professional human resources staffer. “You have to get on with the times and with the way things are run today,” Fisher said.

  Jeannette thanked the foreman for the tip before getting behind the wheel of the Escalade. The couple headed east on Yakima Avenue to the Dairy Queen where they celebrated with ice cream.

  About a year after trial, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission appealed the verdict in the Evans Fruit case. It argued that the company had inappropriately racialized the case to discredit the women who had testified about sexual harassment and assault. “The company’s lawyers reinforced their racist theme that this was effectively a case brought by dishonest brown people against two innocent white people,” the government’s appeal brief said.

  The commission argued that in opening arguments, an Evans Fruit attorney had unnecessarily introduced the issue of race when he told the jury that the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission “is trying to demonize Mr. and Mrs. Evans as the white people on the hill who don’t care for the Mexicans. That’s going to be their theme.”

  The company had also played “the poverty card” by disparaging their socioeconomic status at trial, the government said. The company denied that this was the case, but whether Evans Fruit’s lawyers did or did not bring up race and class in a way that had been inappropriate was never decided on by the courts. In 2016, after nearly two more years of post-trial litigation, the case resulted in a draw when the company and the government agreed to settle the case once and for all. In doing so, neither the company nor Marín admitted any liability or wrongdoing.

  The Evans Fruit case exposed an ugly, unspoken side of farm work but, by most accounts, the lawsuit has prompted change in the fields and orchards of Eastern Washington. At Evans Fruit specifically, the U.S. Equal Employment Opportunity Commission’s involvement inspired the company to draft its first-ever sexual harassment policy in 2008, two years after the first farmworker reported problems to the government. The company also created a confidential phone hotline for workers and one of its bilingual staff members is made available to take complaints.

  Throughout the Yakima Valley, the lawsuit has motivated growers to develop bilingual sexual-harassment policies that provide clear avenues for reporting and require timely and thorough investigations that guard against retaliation. There has also been new energy directed at training workers and supervisors about sexual harassment. Some farms now require all new hires to watch a short video on the topic before they’re allowed to start work—an idea that was developed with the help of Brendan Monahan, one of the lawyers who represented Evans Fruit at trial, who no longer represents the company.

  “I think that this case has fundamentally changed the industry. I really do,” Monahan said shortly after the trial. “And I say that from the perspective of somebody who represents a number of large employers in the industry. We’ve done trainings all across the industry so that crew leads, orchard managers, foremen, know how to identify sexual harassment, know how to document, know how to report it.”

  Blanca Rodríguez, one of the attorneys with the Northwest Justice Project, which represented some of the women in the Evans Fruit case, said the lawsuit
has also encouraged more workers to come forward to report sexual harassment. As a result, the Washington state attorney general and the state’s Human Rights Commission have begun to take on farmworker sexual assault cases.

  Danelia Barajas, a single mother of three, was one of the Evans Fruit farmworkers who had come forward to accuse Juan Marín of sexual harassment. At trial, she had testified that the orchard foreman had asked her to show him her breasts, and that he had grabbed one of her breasts in his truck. She said she had tried to fend Marín off, but she had remained on the job because she didn’t know how else to support her kids.

  On the day that the trial verdict was handed down, Barajas was one of the people packing the courtroom, hopeful that the jury would find in their favor. The jury’s decision left her shocked. She simply could not find reason in it.

  Thinking back on the trial a few weeks afterward, she still couldn’t. “I could see how they would not believe one woman but fourteen women went to court and they don’t believe a single one?”

  Nevertheless, Barajas had come to realize that she was not alone and that there were people who were willing to listen to the way women were treated in the orchard. The revelation had made her determined and emphatic about making her experiences known. “We went and told the truth,” Barajas said. “We took a risk and they did not believe us, and I do not regret that, because in other ranches they are paying more attention to the supervisors. It was a step that we took so that other women would also dare to speak up.”

  3

  Behind Closed Doors and Without a Safety Net

  Most afternoons, June Barrett leaves the Miami apartment that she shares with her twin sister to take a ten-minute cab ride to the wealthy suburb of Pinecrest, Florida. By about five in the afternoon, she arrives at the home of Raymond and Marjorie, a one-story structure as long as a football field decorated with mementos from the couple’s world travels.

  Raymond and Marjorie are in their nineties, and in this house, they have raised five children, celebrated anniversaries and birthdays, and grown old together. It is here, in their home, that June Barrett does her work.

  A woman of boisterous good humor, Barrett is one in a rotation of six household workers who help Raymond and Marjorie with their most fundamental needs. Barrett typically begins her sixteen-hour overnight shift by preparing and serving the couple a three-course evening meal. By request, shrimp appetizers and salad are on heavy rotation.

  After dinner, Barrett helps Marjorie through the standard bed-time rituals of brushing her teeth and changing her clothes. She also makes sure Raymond takes his medication and then helps him in the bathroom. Once the couple is asleep, Barrett cleans the kitchen, the dining room, and whatever else needs tidying. On some nights, she’s able to take a power nap during her shift, though just as often, Barrett is tending to Marjorie throughout the night because the elderly woman, who suffers from dementia, can’t manage to fall asleep.

  By about five in the morning, Barrett is giving Marjorie a sponge bath, and an hour later, she helps Raymond take a shower. Then she makes breakfast and gets Raymond set up in his office so he can send some e-mails. By nine, she is headed home.

  Barrett’s job—domestic work—is the crucial but unseen labor done behind the closed doors of private homes. It is the intimate and invisible work that happens in someone else’s bedroom, bathroom, and kitchen. As a profession, it takes on many forms, from tending to disabled or elderly clients to cooking and cleaning and watching an employer’s kids. Some workers live in their clients’ homes, and some, like Barrett, go home at the end of a set number of hours. But there are few fixed hours or norms in domestic work, and a caregiver can perform a multitude of tasks since the way that people run their households or realize their daily rituals is personal and particular. Its broad range of conditions collides with a lack of industry regulations, so the risk of exploitation is real in domestic work—especially because it has been purposely excluded from various federal labor laws meant to protect workers from abuse.

  Barrett’s current job has become one of the best she’s ever had in her thirty-plus-year career. She says her employer, Judy Aberman, Raymond and Marjorie’s daughter, treats her with respect and pays her fairly. Though there’s little uniformity in the industry when it comes to wages, paid time off, and even the type of work that is required of domestic workers, Barrett says that Aberman pays her and her colleagues a good wage and has realistic expectations for what can be accomplished in a shift. Her boss also provides Barrett and her co-workers with paid sick days and a week of vacation each year, which employers are not required to do under federal law. Another perquisite of her job: Aberman hands out a holiday bonus at the end of the year. “They are critical to the quality of life of my parents’ lives,” Aberman says. “How could you not take care of the people who are taking care of your family?”

  Not all employers operate with the same philosophy, and Barrett, who is originally from Jamaica, hasn’t been spared the abuses that can come with her job. She took her first job as a domestic worker at sixteen in Kingston after falling into the line of work out of necessity.

  Barrett and her twin sister had been orphaned when they were two, and the girls were split up between family members a few years later. Barrett was sent to live in the rural outskirts of Montego Bay with an aunt who she says grudgingly took her in and never let Barrett forget that she was not only a burden but also “too dark.” When Barrett finished public school at fifteen, she says her aunt made it clear that she was no longer welcome in her home.

  Gutsy and self-possessed, Barrett talked her way into a domestic-worker training school run by the Methodist church, where she learned to iron, clean, and cook. After four months, the church placed her in her first job with the family of a government official who lived in a large house in Kingston. Still a teenager, she found herself in charge of running a busy household, but the family she worked for didn’t think Barrett moved fast enough. After what they deemed to be slow service during a social event, they told her to pack up her things.

  Going back to her aunt’s house in the countryside wasn’t an option, so Barrett hustled to find another job as a live-in domestic worker. Things become more complicated when she found out that she’d gotten pregnant by a man she was dating. He denied that he was the child’s father, so she had to fend for herself, but without a job, she was also homeless. The pregnancy made her too sick to work, so she spent her days resting at the house where her twin sister worked as a domestic worker. In the evening, she stayed with a friend. The rest of the time, she wandered the streets of Kingston. After a few months, she found a temporary job as a live-in domestic worker but it was not the solution she had hoped for. When she was eight months pregnant, her employer made a violent sexual advance toward her. Barrett didn’t say anything because she thought she would be blamed for it, though staying silent didn’t help her either. She took out her outrage on the women in the family, and she was fired.

  Barrett found herself homeless again and she had nowhere else to go but back to her family in the countryside. She knew her aunt most certainly wouldn’t take her in, but it turned out that her older sister couldn’t accommodate her either. The only option was to stay in a room in their small village with her ailing and bedridden grandmother.

  A couple weeks after she arrived, with the help of a midwife, she delivered her baby in the room she shared with her grandmother. Two months later, the baby died of meningitis. Barrett was devastated. She tried to cope with her loss by immediately heading back to Kingston to lose herself in work.

  The first job she found was with a couple who needed help around the house and childcare for their two-year-old boy. The husband of the household was a loan officer at a nearby bank, and his wife had a long commute to a job at a phone company.

  Fairly quickly, Barrett began to feel uncomfortable around her male boss because he brought lovers home with him during his lunch hour. Before long, he graduated to fondling and touching Ba
rrett whenever his wife wasn’t around. Then, a few months into the job, he became more aggressive and raped Barrett while his toddler slept in another room.

  It happened more than once. “When he came back and did not have a woman with him, I knew I would be sexually abused that day,” Barrett says.

  This was Barrett’s most extreme experience with on-the-job sexual violence, though it wasn’t her last. The ordeal served to reinforce how difficult it could be to extricate herself from a bad live-in job. What am I going to do? Barrett remembers thinking at the time. I’m not allowed to go back home. Am I going to be in the streets, homeless?

  After six months, she took another job while trying to find other types of work. She enrolled in night classes at the local high school focused on teaching technical skills, which led to a series of office jobs. She liked the work, but at her second job as an office administrator, a co-worker outed her as a lesbian and the word got out. She started receiving threats outside of the office—one man told her that he would rape her straight.

  The homophobia in her country made her fearful enough to spend her savings on plane tickets to South Africa for a gay rights conference and to London, where she spent eight months living with a group of friends from the Caribbean, which gave her time to recover from the stress of life in Jamaica. She thinks back on her travels as one of the best times of her life, but the United States beckoned. Barrett was inspired by what she saw in the movies and in the news. She loved what America represented—a land of freedom and human rights—and she imagined feeling safe there.

  Barrett bought a plane ticket to New York. She had a few extended relatives in the Northeast, including a cousin in Connecticut who picked her up from LaGuardia Airport. To earn a living, she went back to domestic work; she found a job in New Jersey caring for the children of a divorced man. Barrett loved the work and the family, but although she became a U.S. citizen in 2005, she didn’t have authorization to work in the United States at the time. Her boss had no choice but to let her go.